United States Data Center Energy Usage Report
Open accessAbstract
This report estimates historical data center electricity consumption back to 2000, relying on previous studies and historical shipment data, and forecasts consumption out to 2020 based on new trends and the most recent data available. Figure ES-1 provides an estimate of total U.S. data center electricity use (servers, storage, network equipment, and infrastructure) from 2000-2020. In 2014, data centers in the U.S. consumed an estimated 70 billion kWh, representing about 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption. Current study results show data center electricity consumption increased by about 4% from 2010-2014, a large shift from the 24% percent increase estimated from 2005-2010 and the nearly 90% increase estimated from 2000-2005. Energy use is expected to continue slightly increasing in the near future, increasing 4% from 2014-2020, the same rate as the past five years. Based on current trend estimates, U.S. data centers are projected to consume approximately 73 billion kWh in 2020.
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The report estimates nearly 211 billion gallons of indirect water use in 2023.
“the report estimates nearly 211 billion gallons of indirect water use in 2023”
From Navigating Environmental Concerns Confronting U.S. Data Centers Related to Water Quantity and Quality (2026) · cites this paper as [4]
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“For instance, in the United States, the annul electricity consumption of data centers is expected to reach as high as 140 billion kWh by 2020 [7].”
BackgroundA Belief Rule Based Expert System for Datacenter PUE Prediction under Uncertainty
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Green Cloud? An Empirical Analysis of Cloud Computing and Energy Efficiency
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GREENER principles for environmentally sustainable computational science
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Statistical analysis for predicting location-specific data center PUE and its improvement potential
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Quarter-Turn Transformer Design and Optimization for High Power Density 1-MHz LLC Resonant Converter
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“electricity consumption, and is predicted to reach 73 billion kW by 2020 [1].”
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Demand Response in Data Centers: Integration of Server Provisioning and Power Procurement
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“According to a report released from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [1] in 2014, data centers in the U.S. consumed an estimated 70 billion kWh, which represents 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption.”
MethodInfluentialMulti-objective communication-aware optimization for virtual machine placement in cloud datacenters
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How much energy will AI really consume? The good, the bad and the unknown
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Joint data center cooling and workload management: A thermal-aware approach
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“in 2014, and it is projected to increase to 10% by 2020 [1].”
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“(Ahmad et al., 2021; Huang &Masanet, 2015; Shehabi et al., 2016).”
Dual Inductor Hybrid Converter for Point-of-Load Voltage Regulator Modules
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BackgroundExploiting Renewable Energy and UPS Systems to Reduce Power Consumption in Data Centers
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“…to over 20,000 square feet, while colocation and cloud data centers can theoretically be as small as a studio apartment, while the largest ‘ hyperscale ’ data center in the world (Switch ’ s The Citadel in Reno, Nevada) covers over seven-million square feet (Shehabi et al., 2016; Taneja, 2020).”
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“The contribution of the servers, storage, and network facility in the total power consumption of a data center has been reported in several works [46], [47].”
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The water use of data center workloads: A review and assessment of key determinants
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“FIG 1 The average power draw assumptions for both midrange and high-end servers [2].”
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- Authors
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), B., Shehabi, A., USDOE, Smith, S., Sartor, D., Brown, R., Herrlin, M., Koomey, J., Masanet, E., Horner, N., Azevedo, I., & Lintner, W.
- Affiliations
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)
- Stanford University (US)
- Northwestern University (US)
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- United States Department of Energy (US)
- Published
- 2016-06-01
- OpenAlex
- W2736578080
- Cited by
- 1,040
- References
- 32
- Citations by year
- 2026: 88 · 2025: 124 · 2024: 83 · 2023: 88 · 2022: 92 · 2021: 129 · 2020: 121 · 2019: 125 · 2018: 126 · 2017: 59 · 2016: 5
- Type
- report
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- public-domain
- Locations
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) (submittedVersion, public-domain)
- UC Berkeley
- Funders
- USDOE
- DOE (NONE)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Electrical and Electronic Engineering › Green IT and Sustainability
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Hardware and Architecture › Energy Efficiency in Computing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Cloud Computing and Resource Management
- Keywords
- load forecasting, energy demand projections
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